I decided to do an experiment with my short story sales during the month of October. I posted them on Smashwords over the last couple of months at a price of .99cents and made 4 sales over that course of time.
On October 1, I reset all the titles to "Pick your own price" and sold three times as many within a couple days as I had within the last two months. Of course, pick your own price also includes free as a price tag - but if people find a writer they like, they tend to continue to read other stuff by that same author. I figured this was the best way I could get these stories into the hands of readers, to get folks to take a chance on me.
I'm not sure if it will translate into real sales when this is all said and done, but my hope is that it will raise awareness and open more doors for my work.
There has been a great debate on what the golden price is for an e-book and I've seen $2.99 thrown out there a fair amount of times. Is that the magic number? I don't know, but from a consumer standpoint, I'd more readily take a chance on an unknown author if the price was $2.99 as opposed to $6.99 or higher. I'd also be more likely to impulse buy at the lower amount too.
Perhaps this theory has creedence. What would happen if a publisher set the price of a new release as $2.99 for a full length novel - even if it only lasted for the first month along with an advertisement of new releases on sale.
After all, it is amazing what the label "sale" does to the purchasing mentality.
Until next time . . .
JET
http://www.jetaylor75.com/
It's like a "reverse" agency model - price it low at first and THEN sell it high?
ReplyDeleteYes.
ReplyDeleteSamhain is actually doing the first two weeks free for select titles.